Irving Kaplansky
| Irving Kaplansky | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | March 22, 1917 Toronto |
| Died | June 25, 2006 (age 89) Los Angeles |
| Nationality | Canadian, American |
| Fields | Mathematics |
| Institutions |
American Mathematical Society Mathematical Sciences Research Institute University of Chicago Columbia University University of California, Berkeley |
| Alma mater |
University of Toronto Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Saunders Mac Lane |
| Doctoral students |
Hyman Bass Susanna S. Epp Günter Lumer Eben Matlis Jacob Matijevic Donald Ornstein Ed Posner Alex F. T. W. Rosenberg Joseph J. Rotman Judith D. Sally Harold Widom (entire list) |
| Known for |
Kaplansky density theorem Kaplansky's game Kaplansky's conjecture Kaplansky's theorem on quadratic forms Group theory Hilbert space Ring theory Operator algebras Homological algebra Topological algebra Game theory Field theory |
| Notable awards |
William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition (1938) Guggenheim Fellowship (1948) Jeffery–Williams Prize (1968) Honorary member of the London Mathematical Society (1987) Leroy P. Steele Prize (1989) |
Irving Kaplansky (March 22, 1917 – June 25, 2006) was a mathematician, college professor, author, and musician.
Kaplansky or "Kap" as his friends and colleagues called him was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, to Polish-Jewish immigrants; his father worked as a tailor, and his mother ran a grocery and, eventually, a chain of bakeries. He attended the University of Toronto as an undergraduate. In his senior year, he competed in the first William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, becoming one of the first five recipients of the Putnam Fellowship, which paid for graduate studies at Harvard University. Administered by the Mathematical Association of America, the competition "is widely considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics examination in the world, and its difficulty is such that the median score is often zero or one (out of 120) despite being attempted by students specializing in mathematics." Astoundingly, "through 2015, there have been 144,589 participants...Over the seventy-six competitions between 1938 and 2015 there have been only four perfect scores." Kaplansky only got one question wrong. Below is a table of the first five recipients.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941 as Saunders Mac Lane's first student, he remained at Harvard as a Benjamin Peirce Instructor, and in 1944 moved with Mac Lane to Columbia University for one year to collaborate on work surrounding the Manhattan Project with the Applied Mathematics Panel.
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